Russian military strikes on Ukraine destroyed more than 10 million books over the summer, the Ukrainian foreign ministry has said, in what officials describe as a campaign to erase Ukrainian culture. A Russian attack on a publishing house in the northeastern city of Kharkiv took out 8 million books, including roughly 620,000 school textbooks, Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Sunday. Another 60,000 books were ruined in recent Russian assaults on warehouses belonging to several publishers around the Ukrainian capital, Ukrainian authorities said.
Kyiv says Russia is attempting to wipe out Ukrainian identity. Moscow has not explicitly commented on whether it is targeting Ukrainian books and claims to target military sites or areas propping up Ukraine's war effort, like its energy infrastructure. Newsweek has emailed the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.
Just two days before launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the Ukrainian government of attempting to "root out the Russian language and culture" in Ukraine. Moscow has launched at least 21 attacks on Ukraine's book industry in the past four and a half years, Kyiv said. Earlier in August, Ukrainian media reported that Russian bombardment across just two months destroyed around 11.5 million books.
This is equivalent to a third of Ukraine's annual production and higher even than the figure quoted by Kyiv's foreign ministry on Sunday. Many of Ukraine's bookshops have put up their shutters this year because of low demand for their wares, while Russian attacks have destroyed many of the warehouses where books are being stored, according to the Ukrainska Pravda outlet. Across July and August, Russian forces attacked at least nine publishing companies, the outlet reported.
Many specialized in producing books for schoolchildren. "At this stage, we face the risk of the collapse of the entire book ecosystem,” Oleksandra Koval, the director of the Ukrainian Book Institute, said in comments reported by British newspaper The Guardian earlier this month. In mid-August, at least three people were injured in an attack on Kyiv's famed Pochaina book market, according to Ukrainian officials, as fire ripped through the stalls.
Roughly two weeks earlier, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said a Russian drone had careened into a book warehouse and set thousands of books alight. "Russia is afraid of Ukrainian books," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on Friday. "Once, the Russian empire banned Ukrainian books," he said in a statement.
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